AFTER months of hard work, transatlantic phone calls and anonymous tip-offs Bill Lees reckons he has finally got to the bottom of why No Place is called No Place.

"It's because it's in the middle of nowhere and no one wanted it," said the amateur local historian, who is nearing the end of a book on the small village near Stanley.

"It was on the fringe of a number of parishes when it was first built, probably back in the 1700s and none of them wanted it, too much work involved. That's another reason why it got its name."

It is a theory with which Victor Watts, the master of Grey College, at Durham University, who is soon to publish what he hopes will be a definitive history of County Durham place names and is director of the organisation which publishes the 70-plus volumes of the Survey of English Place Names, agrees.

He said: "It is almost certainly that the place was in dispute between parishes. There are a lot of similar names like that for places that came into being in the 17th and 18th Centuries."

Other wryly-named villages in the county include Pity Me, near Durham City.

Mr Watts dismissed the claim, published in at least one book and the subject of a heated debate within the letters pages of the Guardian newspaper, that Pity Me is a corruption of "Petit Mer, the French for little lake. Instead he argues it was simply named as a joke.

Mr Watts explained that most names in County Durham date back to Anglo-Saxon times.

A few can be traced to pre-Roman times, including Auckland, now used in Bishop Auckland and West Auckland. The Aclet Hotel is closer to the original spelling and pronunciation.

Some of the county's names can be traced to Norman times, for example Bearpark, near Durham City, from the French Beau Repair, Beautiful Retreat.

However, hardly any names can be traced to the Vikings, although Iain Watson, author of Why Pity Me?, mentions Ireshopeburn, The Place of the Foreigners, near Stanhope, named after Vikings who entered the country via Ireland.

A few, and only a very few, placenames date from an even earlier period in British history.

The oldest name the county can boast, according to Mr Watts, is Deerness, near Durham City, which means Water River and, he estimates, could go back to the second century BC.

Both books, by Mr Lees and Mr Watts, will be published in the coming months.